Watch Bigscreen’s CEO Talk With Ernest Cline About Ready Player Two

Author Ernest Cline is joining Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar for a conversation to promote his new book, Ready Player Two.

The sequel is due out on November 24th after 2011’s Ready Player One ignited imaginations with its vision of an 80’s-inspired future taken over by VR. The movie version, of course, came out in 2018 directed by Steven Spielberg. The Q&A session with Cline and Shankar will be streamed in Bigscreen on December 5th at 5 pm Pacific. According to Bigscreen, the event will be free to anyone with the Bigscreen application and a supported VR headset.

“Bigscreen is by far my favorite VR application and it’s also the one I’ve used the most this past year,” Cline said in a prepared statement. “I get together with my friends inside Bigscreen at least once a week to hang out, watch movies, and play games together, even though we’re scattered across the country.  I’m so grateful to Darshan and his team for turning something from my imagination into a reality, and for doing it decades before I thought it would be possible.”

ready player two bigscreenWe’re interested to check out the new book and see how it stacks up to the original. There’s even been talk of a prequel as well that would explore the founding of the virtual Oasis that’s central to the story. It’ll be a little different reading the sequel in 2020, though, with VR headsets like Oculus Quest 2, HP Reverb G2, and Valve Index in homes around the world transporting people to virtual worlds.

Are you planning to give the book a read? Let us know in the comments.

Ernest Cline Considering Ready Player One Prequel Novel Next: Ready Player Zero

Did you know Ready Player Two, the sequel to Ernest Cline’s best-selling Ready Player One, is just a week and a half away from release? It releases on November 24th and the author is already discussing potential plans for the next book in the series: a prequel focused on the creators of The Oasis, James Halliday and Ogden Morrow.

ready player two cover

Ready Player One Sequel and Prequel

We originally learned about Ready Player Two back in July of this year, but the release date seems to have really snuck up on us all of a sudden it seems. If you’re unfamiliar, Ready Player One is a sci-fi dystopian novel about a young man named Wade Watts. In it, Wade and his friends are on an “Easter Egg” hunt across the VR metaverse known as The Oasis, after its creator died and left behind a single “Easter Egg” for someone to find. Whoever finds it wins a ton of money and inherits control of The Oasis.

The novel was adapted into a successful feature film, directed by Steven Spielberg. You can read our review of the movie itself (since, you know, VR) right here.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly that was published this week, Cline explains that he always envisioned the series as a trilogy. The third book, in his mind, would be a prequel about the origins of The Oasis’ creators:

“I’d always envisioned it as a trilogy of stories. One is a sequel, which I’ve just written and then another other one being a prequel about James Halliday and Ogden Morrow in Ohio. It’s a coming-of-age story. It won’t be called Ready Player Three, it’ll be more like Ready Player Zero. I do plan to take a break, but someday I’ll write that book too, which is more based on my own childhood — growing up, playing Dungeons and Dragons and video games as a kid. It’s like Stand by Me. It’s a huge part of my childhood being immersed in all the escapism so that I could write Ready Player One.”

Later on in the interview Cline goes to say that with the release of Ready Player Two, we’ll have the end of the story as he “currently” sees it.

What do you think? Would you read a prequel book about Halliday and Morrow? Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

Ernest Cline Considering Ready Player One Prequel Novel Next: Ready Player Zero

Did you know Ready Player Two, the sequel to Ernest Cline’s best-selling Ready Player One, is just a week and a half away from release? It releases on November 24th and the author is already discussing potential plans for the next book in the series: a prequel focused on the creators of The Oasis, James Halliday and Ogden Morrow.

ready player two cover

Ready Player One Sequel and Prequel

We originally learned about Ready Player Two back in July of this year, but the release date seems to have really snuck up on us all of a sudden it seems. If you’re unfamiliar, Ready Player One is a sci-fi dystopian novel about a young man named Wade Watts. In it, Wade and his friends are on an “Easter Egg” hunt across the VR metaverse known as The Oasis, after its creator died and left behind a single “Easter Egg” for someone to find. Whoever finds it wins a ton of money and inherits control of The Oasis.

The novel was adapted into a successful feature film, directed by Steven Spielberg. You can read our review of the movie itself (since, you know, VR) right here.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly that was published this week, Cline explains that he always envisioned the series as a trilogy. The third book, in his mind, would be a prequel about the origins of The Oasis’ creators:

“I’d always envisioned it as a trilogy of stories. One is a sequel, which I’ve just written and then another other one being a prequel about James Halliday and Ogden Morrow in Ohio. It’s a coming-of-age story. It won’t be called Ready Player Three, it’ll be more like Ready Player Zero. I do plan to take a break, but someday I’ll write that book too, which is more based on my own childhood — growing up, playing Dungeons and Dragons and video games as a kid. It’s like Stand by Me. It’s a huge part of my childhood being immersed in all the escapism so that I could write Ready Player One.”

Later on in the interview Cline goes to say that with the release of Ready Player Two, we’ll have the end of the story as he “currently” sees it.

What do you think? Would you read a prequel book about Halliday and Morrow? Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

Ernest Cline’s VR Novel Ready Player One Gets a Sequel in November

Ready Player Two

When it comes to big sci-fi novels from the last decade Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011) has to be highly placed, having spent over 100 weeks on the coveted New York Times bestsellers list as well as the Steven Spielberg movie adaption. Fans of the book will be pleased to hear a sequel is on its way, scheduled to arrive this November.

Ready Player One 02

Imaginatively called Ready Player Two, the book is slated to continue on from the original, taking readers back into the dystopian future where humanity spends most of its time in a massive online universe called the OASIS, escaping their normal lives in the process.

Apart from continuing that theme nothing else is known about the plot for Ready Player Two. The book will be published by Penguin Random House subsidiary Ballantine Books on 24th November 2020 and it’ll contain 384. Pre-orders have now gone live on Amazon for Kindle (£9.99 GBP), Hardcover (£20.00) and Audio CD (£20.00) editions.

Launched before consumer virtual reality (VR) headsets were available, Ready Play One became a novel all fans of the technology had to read. Set in the year 2044, the world is riddled with famine, poverty, and disease because the climate is a wreck. The story follows Wade Watts and his friends as his lives his life in the OASIS, obsessively trying to locate a hidden easter egg left by James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS.

Upon his death, Halliday issued a challenge to everyone in the OASIS, as he had no heir whoever found the egg would gain control over the OASIS, as well as his billion-dollar fortune. However, he didn’t make it easy and years have passed with no one succeeding. Of course, that soon changes.

As Halliday grew up in the ’80s there are masses of references to classic videogames and films throughout the story. That does look to have been continued as the Ready Player Two cover does have what it appears to be a reference to Pitfall (1982) a classic Activision title.

With VR being a far more dominant entertainment medium in recent years, it’ll be interesting how the author has taken this on board. For further updates, keep reading VRFocus.

‘Ready Player One’ Book Sequel Coming November 24th

Ernest Cline’s breakout novel Ready Player One is getting a sequel on November 24th, which is slated to delve back into the massive multiplayer VR world of the OASIS.

Aptly named Ready Player Two, the upcoming book is being published by Penguin Random House subsidiary Ballantine Books.

It’s already available for order on and available for pre-order on Amazon, both in Kindle and hardcover format.

Released in 2011, Ready Player One casts a dim vision of the year 2044. Like much of humanity, Wade Watts lives most of his life connecting to the massive multiplayer ‘OASIS’, which acts as a VR escape amid famine and social unrest. It’s a tale of ’80s nostalgia which flows recursively back into fashion thanks to the very Willy Wonka-esque prize hunt the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, left behind him after his death. That’s the bare bones, no spoiler version of it anyway.

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RPO has celebrated its fair share of success; it spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was adapted into a film, produced by Steven Spielberg.

Another big endorsement: Palmer Luckey, Oculus founder and inventor of the Oculus Rift, liked the novel so much that in the early days all Oculus employees received a copy of the book. Of course, not everyone appreciated it.

Besides the book’s page count (384) and ISBN, there isn’t any further info on Ready Player Two just yet. The cover shows a single Pitfall (1982) style character lunging for what appears to be a diamond—so definitely some amount of ’80s references to play off of here.

Love it or hate it, it’s going to be interesting to see whether Cline has changed his views on virtual reality since writing the first in the series, which came two years before the original 2012 Oculus Kickstarter campaign and resultant relaunching of VR headsets into the consumer market.

The post ‘Ready Player One’ Book Sequel Coming November 24th appeared first on Road to VR.

Ready Player Two Sequel Novel Releasing This November

Big news in the book world today! Ready Player Two, the direct sequel to Ernest Cline’s 2011 break out novel, Ready Player One, is set for publication on November 24th, 2020.

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011) is a sci-fi novel set in a not-too-distant future where resource scarcity has left the world a shallow husk of what it once was forcing society indoors to instead live out most of their lives in VR. It reached the top of the sales charts and spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list before being adapted to film by Steven Spielberg in 2018. You can read and watch our review of the feature film by the same name at that link.

Check out the minimalist, albeit appropriate, cover image for Ready Player Two right here:

ready player two cover

Cline has been working on the sequel novel for several years now, but we finally have a firm release date set. Plot details are scarce, but Cline has been clear in interviews that this will be a direct follow-up to the book itself, not the film. There are tons of differences between the two, which should make for an interesting continuation of the story.

The film went on to earn over $580M at the box office on a budget of around $160M and was considered a success. I’d be surprised if a film based on the sequel doesn’t materialize.

I don’t want to get into spoiler territory here, but let us know what you’d like to see happen in Ready Player Two down in the comments below. I certainly have plenty of ideas about where they could take the story considersing how completely the plot threads were tied off at the end.

Leave a comment down below!

The post Ready Player Two Sequel Novel Releasing This November appeared first on UploadVR.